A distributed computing project is an application of computer networking in which the computing power of several different computers across a network (usually the Internet) is harnessed to tackle one monumental problem. Perhaps the most famous distributed computing project is SETI@home, which lets the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence use individual computers to analyze radio telescope data. The popularity of this SETI@home has inspired the use of distributed computing in mathematics, with the most famous of these being the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Seventeen or Bust is another famous mathematical distributed computing project.

Most distributed computing projects involve one server supercomputer to coördinate the rest. The main server parcels out tasks to the other computers and receives results from them. For mathematical distributed computing projects, the verification of results is typically done by a computer at the project headquarters.